The 21st century had barely begun when Grandaddy’s grandest opus The Sophtware Slump arrived, its thrift-store synthesiser threnodies intimating that maybe mankind should have succumbed to the millennium bug after all. Critics heard parity between the California group’s graceful gloom and the fin-de-siècle anxieties of Radiohead. But while singer-songwriter Jason Lytle cheerfully confessed OK Computer as an inspiration, Grandaddy bore heavier influence from the Beach Boys and country.
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That latter element has never been as explicit as on their sixth full-length: Lytle’s sole foil throughout is Max Hart, on mooning pedal steel, while song titles like You’re Going To Be Fine and I’m Going To Hell evoke the genre’s deft balance of heartbreak and deadpan drollness. As ever, the themes are loss and loneliness: Cabin In My Mind is a desolate musing on the unattainability of dreams; the narrator of On a Train Or Bus is haunted by memories of a love for ever lost. On Watercooler, Lytle roams the halls of an office like a ghost, eavesdropping tears shed in a bathroom stall and mining the quotidian ennui of working life for material.
He leavens the sorrow with flashes of humour, such as when he pretends he’s a malevolent jukebox demanding “more credits … or I’ll play way more songs”, a knowing wink that perhaps these pervading miseries could overwhelm. In truth, Lytle’s crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.
